3. Shutdown your PC, remove all other hard drives except the WD Green drive that you want to change the wdidle timer on.

4. Restart your PC and go into your PC's BIOS and make sure you turn AHCI off otherwise your flash drive will not be recognized. Also make sure that the thumb drive is set as the first bootable drive. Save your BIOS settings.

5. Restart your PC, it should hopefully see the thumb drive and boot from it into MS-DOS.

6. Once in MS-DOS, type "wdidle3.exe" without the quotes and press enter. The wdidle3.exe utility should run. From there, you can use the following commands:

wdidle3.exe /r
-this will provide you info on the drive including the current timeout. Factory default is 8 seconds.

wdidle3.exe /s300
-this will change the autopark timer to 300 seconds (5 minutes) which is the maximum allowed.

You can also do another wdidle3.exe /r after you make the change to see that the drive has accepted the new timer.

**DO NOT USE** the wdidle3.exe /d command. This turns the timer off however many people have reported that the drives eventually slow down to a crawl and/or generate errors using this command. The best is to change the timer to 300 seconds.

Once done, shut your PC off and repeat step-6 for each WD Green drive 4K drive.

Once you are finished, plug your hard drives back in, go back into your BIOS and turn AHCI on, change your boot order, etc. and reboot back into Windows.
Drink a beer.

edit: fixed some typos and removed the space in the 'wdidle3.exe /s300' command line. (thanks XX).

Forum messages are not reviewed and may not contain accurate information about a product.
Message contents are opinions from customers based on their own experience with a product.
We do not recommend you make puchasing decisions based on Forum messages.